Pre-installation

BIOS Configuration

Get into the BIOS by pushing the assist button when the system is shut off and then hitting Start BIOS Setup. Do not try to boot from your usb key using recovery mode, instead change the boot order in the BIOS. Make the following changes:

Install media

Important! Do NOT use the usb port labelled with a lightning bolt, you will never get it to even boot.

When booting from USB you might need to append libata.force=noncq to the kernel parameters to avoid problems with the SSD. You may even need to make this a persistent kernel parameter when booting from the SSD after installation.

Video

Sound

As the Installation guide suggests, install alsa-utils and follow this guide to get started.
Works out of the box, although main sound card may have index 1, making it non-default (index 0 is taken by Intel HDMI). To fix this, edit /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf (near line 68):

/usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf

defaults.ctl.card 1
defaults.pcm.card 1

WiFi

The Intel 7260 WiFi card is supported in Linux kernel 3.11 or newer.

Touch screen

Tapping works out of the box. Multitouch gestures do not work.

Keyboard backlight

Works out of the box. Enables in low amblient light and a key press, turns off after about 20s.
Can be customized by modifying kbd_backlight and kbd_backlight_timeout found in:

/sys/devices/platform/sony-laptop/

A simple shell script for toggling the backlight, bind to a keyboard shortcut for easy use:

Monitor backlight control

Works out of the box with xorg-xbacklight. By default the backlight is only adjusted by 1% per button press. This can easily be fixed by binding those keys to a xorg-xbacklight command. DM:s like Xfce does take larger steps by default.

With KDE 1% adjustment can be fixed by kernel module parameter video.brightness_switch_enabled=0. This will disable kernel driver 1% adjustment, then KDE PowerDevil correctly adjust brightness by 10% and shows gauge window. There is no need to bind keys.